Chew. Spit. Repeat.

Looking back, the truest sign that then-Vivendi Universal honcho Jean-Marie Messier was toast may have come when he showed up for a public forum at the Beverly Hilton two years ago with Viacom Chief Executive Sumner Redstone and other entertainment industry power players, and he wasn't wearing a necktie. The accepted sartorial style for Eurobusiness potentates is, after all, buttoned-up, highly starched, primary colors formality with all the accoutrements -- forget the pocket square and you might as well be naked. On that occasion, Messier had on a shrimp-colored open-necked shirt under his charcoal gray suit. But that affront to taste was just one sign that yet another outsider had gone Hollywood. He had gotten slimmer too, and radiated a healthy tan even in photos.

Little did he know that he was headed for that nearly inevitable fate, the one that has befallen scores of interlopers who've dared to become moguls in that alluring but inscrutable culture known as the motion picture industry: Messier was about to be spanked by Hollywood.

"We don't go for strangers," spoke one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's characters in the writer's final, unfinished Hollywood novel. But he didn't get it completely right. The Industry likes interlopers just fine--as long as they empty their wallets and don't overstay their welcome. That scenario has been repeated in Hollywood almost as often as the two-unlikely-cops-become-wisecracking-crime-fightin'-buddies action thriller. An outsider, flush with success in some other industry or bankrolled by a family fortune, bursts onto the scene with dreams of becoming the next Louis B. Mayer, only to slink away a year or three later in ignominious defeat. The most recent, high-profile examples--Messier and Edgar Bronfman Jr., the Seagram heir whose Hollywood ambitions were intertwined with Vivendi's--are only the latest in a series that goes back to the early days of Hollywood, when sharpies such as William Randolph Hearst and Joe Kennedy came West to get their pockets picked.

Since then, scores of other West Coast carpetbaggers have met with varying degrees of failure--old-line industrialists, Wall Street financiers, insurance conglomerates and corporate raiders, New Economy wunderkinds from this country, plus Dutch, Japanese, British, Italian and Israeli hopefuls. The recent news that Comcast, the Philadelphia-based cable-TV giant, may make a hostile bid for Walt Disney Co. raises the possibility that Hollywood may welcome yet another outsider and would-be mogul--Comcast Chief Executive Brian L. Roberts, a publicity-shy, squash-playing scion of a family that amassed its wealth by making belts. But with few exceptions, such as Australian media baron Rupert Murdoch, the movie industry has chewed up and spit out newcomers like hunks of Morton's prime-cut steak.